This invention relates to a motor control device that controls each of a plurality of motors which independently drives a corresponding one of a plurality of driven bodies. Particularly, the present invention concerns a motor control device and a motor control method of controlling a velocity of and a phase difference among each of the plurality of driven bodies to desired values, and an image forming apparatus including the motor control device.
In a conventional image forming apparatus that drives and rotates a plurality of photoreceptors to form a color image, it is necessary to control not only a rotational velocity of each of the photoreceptors to a predetermined value but also a rotational phase thereof to be consistent with each other. This is because eccentric rotation of each of the photoreceptors may cause a different surface velocity, even though the rotational velocity of each of the photoreceptors is the same. Therefore, it has been proposed to temporarily change each target velocity value of some of the photoreceptors according to phase difference among each of the photoreceptors so as to correct the phase difference.